


What We Are to Each Other

by karahboou



Category: The Good Place (TV)
Genre: Alternate Timelines, Alternative Perspective, Drabble, F/M, Falling In Love, Fluff, Forehead Kisses, Gentleness, One Shot, Philosophy, Romantic Fluff, Short One Shot, Soulmates, Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-21
Updated: 2018-02-21
Packaged: 2019-03-22 01:07:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,114
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13753047
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/karahboou/pseuds/karahboou
Summary: Chidi Anagonye has never been more sure of how unsure he feels about Eleanor Shellstrop. She is something to him in all 800 versions of reality- something more than a mistake. A mis-soulmate maybe.





	What We Are to Each Other

  **Attempt #802**

_Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards. - Søren Kierkegaard_

 

This isn’t the version of himself that is in love with Eleanor Shellstrop.

The night has all the quiet desperation of the complacent damned. There are fireflies, garden lights, the twirl of green, red, and blue from the plastic party accoutrements on the stucco wall of the empty house behind them. The trellises frame their little band of misfits in healthy, springtime dreaming.

Chidi is awash in a sort of peace that doesn’t rattle with his usual clattering of thought, like dropping marbles all over the linoleum in the campus library. His feet are bare and in the grass. Frank Sinatra is playing moonishly in the background. Tahani and Michael are waltzing with more class than he’s ever been close to, a perfect four-step out-of-time. Jason is trying to teach Janet how to armpit fart beside the rusty lawn chairs.

 Eleanor is standing with a polaroid camera, trying her best to frame Tahani and Michael in a shot with one hand but gives up and tosses the non-compliant offender into the grass behind the DJ booth. Her hair floating and staticky around her face in corn-silk platinum. Drink fitted perfectly between her thumb and index finger, the comfort of the night-owls and the last-calls hanging off the corner of her easy smile. Orange-red lipstick smudged but unattended to. Eyes wide and excited with that minute and perpetual sadness edged behind the dark frame of pupil.

 He shakes his head and thinks of Kierkegaard and his leaps into faith. She is stepping off a cliff’s ledge and thinking — how impossible it would be to replicate the view. Beautiful.

 A siren’s call for moral imperfection, she is his passion for works-in-progress. He somehow spent eight-hundred iterations puzzling over the implausibility of re-making a damaged soul, so self-obsessed with her own scuff marks that she seemed impervious to ethical dilemma. It was a special kind of magnetism that really spotlighted his teleological shortcomings on the outset of pretentious academic musing.

If poetry is the truest form of expression, then Eleanor is poetry. Vulgar, indiscreet, profane and concrete more than metaphorical poetry. Forking poetry.

Maybe he loved a past version of Eleanor. It’s not that he doesn’t remember. He feels it just beyond his fingertips every time he reaches out. That twinge that burns red hot in the tips of his ears and usually just manifests in some variation of “What?”.

He knows that he could love her. But if he felt so decisive before, it isn’t so simple now—as he would be pretending he has shed the most fundamental cornerstone of his personal flaws. He could love her. He did love her with all the fear of losing her. But only in spirited arguments and long hours of laughing, discombobulated oversharing and eating frozen yogurt from the same spoon with quiet worry about their predicament and their potential discovery.

But it wouldn’t be fair to love her in a version that could not offer her the unshakeable sureness that she romanticized in the video. The kind that kissed her forehead and wrapped an arm around her waist. That was plain moral. Undebateable.

Her seafoam eyes lock onto his. She begins half-skipping up to him trilling “Dance, dance, dance with me!” Drunk.

Her forehead bumps into his chest as she tries unsuccessfully to slow herself. He can’t help but smile because he can feel the protest climb into the back of his mouth while his arms are reaching out to catch her. Ever a walking contradiction.

 

**Attempt #649**

_Morality is not the doctrine of how we may make ourselves happy, but of how we may make ourselves worthy of happiness - Immanuel Kant_

 

“If I’m so **_shirty_** of a person for not wanting to teach you when you are three hours late, then I’m done, Eleanor!” he is holding his glasses and Aristotle’s _Nicomachean Ethics_ tightly in his left hand, forehead pressed hard into his right.

It’s a little over three weeks into their arrangement and and she has somehow managed to ditch class every other day. It’s the same routine, always ending in her pleading and cajoling about the danger she’s in until he gives her the lesson despite continued, repeated offenses.He can’t fathom how someone can be so imprudent and selfish and manipulative. If he were still on Earth she would be so far kicked out of his class she wouldn’t have even realized it until the door had hit her in the _ash_.

 But for some reason he stays and waits _every. single. time._ Because damn it, it’s morally corrupt to go back on a promise. Because something in her eyes reminds him of a kicked and scrappy puppy.

 “ _Oh really,_ Mr. Moral High Horse. _You’re_ the one that’s done here.” she is an entire head shorter than him, jabbing an index finger right into his breastbone, “Where you just yak about god knows what in circles and somehow I’m supposed become good? That’s bullshirt, okay?!”

He lifts his gaze and he can barely make out the impressionist curve of her frown, his near blindness painting her as a blur of frantic movement, “ _You’re_ the one who came to _me_ for help! Maybe if you paid attention in class instead of pushing back your cuticles— with my favorite pen by the way, some of this would stick!”

 “Who has a favorite pen, Chidi?” he knows she is scrunching up her nose the way she always does when she feels completely debased by his “inaneness”, “ ** _Nerds_**.”

 He attempts to push past her, ramming their shoulders together… and his shin into the coffee table, as he stumbles forward, “Well it sure seems like you don’t need me then. So I’m going to leave and find somewhere to be alone with my nerd books, away from _you._ ”

 "Wait, dude—!”

He feels his nose slam into the chalkboard a millisecond too late as he feels himself careen backwards and his head crack against the hardwood. There is shrill ringing in his ears and Eleanor’s burred and frantic features drift into his dimming field of vision before it cuts to black.

 

* * *

 

There’s a sharp and throbbing pain at the back of his head as he comes to. He can see swaths of red and blue polka-dotting the back of his eyelids as he tries to find the will to open them and find out just what kind of miserable headache he is in for. He finally does as the ceiling of the bedroom comes into view, completely out-of-focus as it always is in the morning. Wincing, Chidi reaches over to his left and sighs in relief when his fingers close around the familiar shape of his glasses on top of the nightstand. Slipping them on and gingerly sitting up, he realizes the room is dim, only the soft white glow of the bedside lamp casting long, oily shadows across the walls.

 As he swings his legs over the side of the bed, his heel smacks against a fleshy mass with a dull thud and he nearly falls backwards, “Fork!”

 “Ow! What the hell, man?” Eleanor begins rubbing the side of her face dramatically, squishing her cheek in doughy folds as she turns to glare at him.

 He holds the back of his head as he leans forwards, then rests his elbows on his knees, “What? Why are you sitting on the floor?!”

 She exhales sharply as she looks up at him, “I don’t know— I wanted to see if you were going to wake up! It’s been like three hours.”

 He blinks slowly, “I’m already dead you know. Can’t die again.”

 She snorts, “Yeah, duh, I knew that shirt-for-brains. Do you know how heavy you are for being surprisingly ripped? I had to roll you up onto the weird ledge to get you onto the bed.”

He grimaces as he rolls his shoulders, realizing the full body ache was probably not from whacking his head on the chalkboard. She certainly wasn’t gentle.

He ignores the insult, “You were worried.”

She twists up her mouth and sticks her tongue out, “Was not.”

He just studies her. She had changed into a baggy Michigan Law sweatshirt with holes along the neckline, and thinning leggings that accent the edge of her hot pink boyshorts underneath. She doesn’t have any makeup on, the crows feet at the corners of her eyes more pronounced with agitation. He fights back a smile but doesn’t say anything as he sinks to the floor, cross-legged, beside her.

“Look, why are you still blind?” she nudges him a little with her shoulder, “I mean this place is paradise. You could probably ask Janet to, like, zap your eyes or something and presto! 20-20." 

He shrugged, “I don’t know— I’ve been horribly nearsighted since I was six or seven. And I just— didn’t really think about it.”  

“I mean is it worth the nasty headache you have?” her smile was something dangerously close to affectionate, “That poor chalkboard.”

“Since when do you pay attention to if I’m not feeling great?” he raises his eyebrows dramatically, “You actually tend to be the source of my headaches.” 

She punches him in the shoulder with just enough force to get him to grimace, “Hey, I care! And I pay attention to you.”

“You wouldn’t stop calling me ‘Chili’ for the first two weeks,” he retorts, “And not on purpose.”

“Fair, fair.” she pulls her legs up to her chest and wraps her arms around her shins, resting her head on her knees, “But now you get to get rid of those lame glasses and be a new man! A new Chili!”

He sighs and shakes his head, “I don’t know, it’s just so much a part of me I don’t know who I’d be if I didn’t reach for my glasses in the morning.”

“Your glasses are totally like a security blanket.” when he crinkles his eyebrows in confusion she nods her head for emphasis, “You know like a little kid’s stuffed animal. Like when I had a lucky bottle opener keychain that I took with me everywhere. It couldn’t open bottles for shirt because it was broken, but I stole it off my Dad’s keys when I was fifteen.”

He nods, slightly surprised at how off... but somehow fitting her personal analogy seems. The bar is pretty low, though, as bars go. He tries to lean back as Eleanor suddenly reaches over and tries to lift the glasses from his ears. He swats at her wrists but she manages to quickly close her fingers around one side by smushing her palm right up against the front of his face and puts them on herself. Her cheap perfume that she’s probably smudged at the heel of her hand smells like honeysuckle. Her eyes pop open wide as she tries to blink and adjust herself to what he knows she is seeing—just a mess of light and color and fuzzy shapes.

“Dude,” she says, pushing the glasses up on top of her head, “You’re _blind_ , _blind_.”

 He turns to the Eleanor shaped blob to his right and rolls his eyes, “No kidding.”

“Okay, how many fingers am I holding up?” her form bounces a little.

“You do know that’s not how this works right?” he shakes his head disbelievingly, “I can see the outline of your fingers, just not like… where the pink blob of your constantly moving mouth starts and ends." 

She huffs, “You’re stalling.” 

“Fine, okay.” he grabs her fingers, “Two.”

She reaches out and places his glasses back where they belong. As she comes into focus, Chidi can’t help but notice that he hasn’t let go of her hand. His fingers are always cold and she has such a pleasant warmth to her.

She bats his hand away and he feels a spike of involuntary disappointment until her palms travel to the sides of his face. She squeezes until his cheeks squish and he’s making fish-lips, “Unfair, you had to go off eyes alone.”

He sounds like he has marshmallows in his cheek pouches, “You would have unethically lied to me about the right answer if I was actually unable to tell.”

That earns him a laugh as she pulls back and rests her temple on his shoulder, “Yeah, probably. I’ll have to work harder in class to fight that urge.”

They are quiet for a moment. It’s low-lit contentment. He watches her make shadow puppet dogs with her hands on the walls, her lips mouthing silent barking as she parades them across the wall. He knows he isn’t done with her— won’t be done with her. He should stick around. He made a promise.

She beats him to it, “Look, Chidi, I’m sorry about what I said earlier and for ditching and wasting your time. I have a lot to work on and I hate admitting that. The whole too-good-for-this front is my security blanket.”

He pats the top of her head awkwardly, “It’s fine. Just try to catch up with the reading okay?”

“Done. You hit the jackpot man, you get to mentor the hottest and the smartest girl in class.” she looks up at him, crinkling her forehead to make eye contact.

“The only student in my class.” he smirks as he nudges her upright and slowly stands, offering a hand to help her up, “You were worried about your lame professor though.”

She takes it and scowls, “Shut up.”

 

**Attempt #112**

_Nothing is destroyed until it is replaced - Auguste Comte_

 

They are at Corn-y Confections in the town center, lime green metal chairs pressed into their backs in just the uncomfortable spots, corn on the cobs untouched but butter melting into the golden notches. She is reading Rousseau with a faraway look. In their short six months of classes Chidi has learned that Eleanor spacing out is not actually meant to be taken as disrespectful. He didn’t believe in learning by passively absorbing information, in fact he often had a rolled up newspaper to smack anyone over the head that he caught dozing in his class. Sure, her eyes cross a little, and she inevitably ends up chewing on her hair with all the appearance of zoning out. But, he had attempted a little experiment once or twice where he would mention shrimp, snap her out of her trance, and ask her a topical question that she infuriatingly answered correctly every single time.

He slides his hand quietly across the grainy surface of the table and tugs the book away from her and her gaze snaps into focus, eyes narrowing.

“Rude, Chidi.” she yanks it back in her direction, “I was reading that.”

He rolls his eyes, “You’ve been on that page for twenty minutes." 

“Uh, we can’t all be you and speed-read.” she pulls the book into her stomach, perching her heels on the edge of the chair as she angles herself away from him. He scoots his chair next to hers and she turns even further away to keep him from making another grab, pushing her hand up against his cheek. 

“I’m guessing you’re really absorbing the meaning of the social contract theory then?” he says smugly, as he finally manages to grab the spine and reclaim Rousseau's work from her.

“Yeah. I’m giving up my afterlife to basically sit here in boring class and listen to you boring talk so you protect my identity.” she says all in one breath.

“You’re avoiding eternal damnation by listening to me boring-talk— wait and I let us have class outside today to be less boring like you insisted!” he laughs, “But you’re sort of getting it. We do the right thing and follow the rules— the will for good of the collective, giving up some of our freedoms, in order to preserve our integrity and our personal rights.”

“Sounds like a shirty quid-pro-quo.” she rolls her eyes.

He shakes his head, “It’s interesting— almost an argument with evolutionary origins. A fundamental interest in the survival of as many individuals as possible, with every individual motivated by self-preservation, results in the infrastructure of moral guidelines in a collective—“

He pinches the bridge of his nose behind his glasses to relieve an unexpected itch when all of a sudden a crumpled, slightly butter-stained napkin is thrust centimeters from his face. He blinks once, quickly, in surprise before a violent sneeze is wrenched from his chest, unfortunately sending Eleanor’s offering careening outwards and dots of spittle to spray all over her hand.

“ _Gross!”_ She throws the napkin at him and he catches it by the corner as she begins dragging her hand across the front of her shirt, “Chidi what the fork! Can you catch colds in the afterlife? Do you need to go home to nap or rest or whatever?!”

He wipes his nose, inhaling the rich scent of slightly salty butter, and studies her. Time has passed simply and easily into a comfortable familiarity despite the complete upheaval of illusory paradise. Eleanor had bludgeoned her way into his afterlife, completely unwelcome, but she was starting to feel familiar, inseparable and inescapably chaotic in a consistent way.She knows him somehow down to what he looks like before he is about to sneeze. She, however unintentionally, cares enough to notice. He just chooses not to notice that he laughs more than he ever has in life. That his brain goes into careening thought-spirals less and less often when she is sitting beside him.

Her mouth is puckered in a disgusted sneer, shoulders slouched. She has a childish hotheadedness that holds all the gravity of dead seriousness and offense. She broadcasts her pain, chews loudly, mocks freely. But she is whip smart. She is also gentle and soft and apologizes genuinely. She is always ready to be excited, almost constantly primed by it. She gives away her laughs like small change, and holds her shoulders back when she is sad. And he has collected these little things in his back pocket. And it surges like affection. And it settles with friendliness like early fall.

He thinks of Austen. And reading in a sagging leather armchair by the window in the quietest corner of the library at St. John’s. Watching the sailboats go by in the harbor. Finding a pressed iris in the folds of the final pages of Pride and Prejudice. That moment of clarity. Her tipped smile.

“I was in the middle before I had even knew I had began.” he murmurs. 

She stops wiping her hand on her shirt and looks up, “Speak up, teach. Did I miss something? Oh god, this was probably in some reading I didn’t do right?”

“You think the corn-flavored ice cream shop down the street is open?” he says, slightly dazed, “That could be un-boring for a little break before moving into Comte.”

Something was broken. Slightly sweeter. 

She looks up at him with an earnest eagerness that has all the afterglow of the smell of coffee spilling onto the kitchen counter in the morning frenzy. She is seeing the train coming right for him and choosing not to step out of the way because he knows it will stop. He thinks he might be in love. All the fullness of taking on the challenge of everything she was, and thoroughly making mistakes. Mis-soulmates.

But first, letting her drag him by the wrist as she shovels all the books into her other arm, the enigma of corn-flavored ice cream.

 

**Attempt #742**

_Illusory joy is often worth more than genuine sorrow. - Rene Descartes_

 

The sun is hot and burdensome on the cracked and dusty ground. Mindy St. Claire’s backyard stretches indefinitely before his eyes and Chidi is unsure if the middle place may in fact just be the perpetual haze of a dream. The horizon seems to roll off into sameness in the distance, feeding the liminal nature of the moment. He stands amongst the sunflowers, their towering, seedy innards starting to lean to face him, sunny petals curling in at a rapidly approaching dusk of their lives. He tries to breathe in deeply and dispel the disquiet that trailed at his heels from the drooping, 80’s style living room. 

“Dude, check it out!” he turns around to see Eleanor bouncing down the peeling, baby-blue, rotting wood of the back porch. In her hands is a tattered soccer ball, the black thinning and cracked to a thread-bare burlap brown.

“I’m surprised Mindy has anything remotely involving sports in her weird, half-paradise.” he chuckles, having to lean out, one foot leaving the ground to catch the ball as Eleanor tosses it in a wide, underhand arc.

“It’s way flat,” she kicks the air a few times with ungainly but charming intent, “C’mon Chidi, you and me, one v one!”

“Really, soccer? The train is coming soon, Eleanor.” he ignores her poking his arm with accented eyebrow raises in an attempt to convince him, “If we’re going to walk straight into the hands of the enemy— which by the way I still think is irrevocably and fatally overconfident that we would get anywhere in both capturing Michael _and_ forcing him to take us to the good place…”

“Hey, hey. We don’t have a better plan. And we owe it to whoever else that demon tries to bring into his torture-neighborhood to put a stop to it. You taught me that.” she is earnest as she speaks.

He pokes her on the forehead but feels a subtle pride quiet the nervous anticipation in the back of his mind, “You just want to avoid lukewarm beer for the rest of your existence.”

“I just want to see if your bragging about your soccer skills last week has any real weight!” she retorts.

He smiles and looks over at the rusted screen door that bangs as Tahani and Jason emerge, “No teams?”

She takes the ball back and tosses it to the ground where it lands, unmoving, with an unceremonious splat, “Like we’d ever play if I suggested we choose.”

He sticks his foot out, the side of his faded Converse sinking into the doughy flank of the soccer ball as he leans forward into a run. He can hear Eleanor shriek, “False start!” as he charges forward. The dry air rakes pleasantly over his cheeks. He throws in a touch of footwork, dribbling a bit as he feels the his muscles warming. His worn leather loafers were smeared with red-orange dust, the edges of his khakis blooming with dirtas he makes his way towards an imaginary goal. When he was growing up in Senegal, his favorite time of the day was during after school games of pick-up in the field behind the schoolyard. It was the slant of afternoon sun, fingers sticky from the waxy sides of apple juice boxes, breathing hard with his heart swelling in his chest. He kicks harder, leaning into the feeling of breathlessness and the wholly human familiarity of exertion.

He can hear her gaining on him and glances back to see a wild joy take to the frustrated line of her mouth, as she pumps her arms to try and gain on his longer gait. Her ankle shoots forward and he feints left, managing to outmaneuver her as she stumbles and scowls at him. He pulls his foot back to free-kick the ball aimlessly into the distance, the shout of “Goal!” bubbling in his throat, when out of the corner of his eye, he sees Eleanor. Her hair is streaming away from her face as she lets out a victorious laugh, hurtling past him, bending down and scooping up the ball in her arms. He keels forward and just barely manages to stay on his feet, taking several wide steps to regain his balance as he whips around to see her running towards the garden, soccer ball football carried under her arm.

“Eleanor good people don’t cheat!” his voice cracking in exasperation but also a happy kind of disbelief. He sprints after her, enjoying the strain it takes to catch up. Her flagrant disrespect for the rules was one of the first things he learned he could count on from her. Her uncontainable spirit and her keen eye in seeing when she could gain any upper hand, no pride in the challenge but in gouging out a path of least resistance. He was appalled when he first met her. Now, it has metamorphosed into a pervasive respect.

“Yeah but I’m gonna win!” she pulls the ball out from under her arm and flails it above her head in a taunting, ridiculous, backwards gallop as she turns to face him.

He shakes his head and rolls his eyes, getting low and putting every bit of his strength to propel himself forward. Her expression drops from one of victory to the beginnings of a gasp as he barrels straight into her stomach. His arms wrap around her waist as he tackles her and they hit the ground in a tangle of limbs and a cloud of dust. He swivels himself just before they land so that he can cushion her fall, the wind slammed out of his chest as his back crashes against the dirt.

He heaves a cough as Eleanor sits up, straddling his hips and pressing her palms flat into his shoulders as she lifts herself up, hair framing her face. She stares at him for a moment before breaking into snorting laughs, forehead dropping to his for a moment. She smells like sweat and tea-tree shampoo and her eyes are squinted with mirth. He pinches her cheek and she leans back still snickering.

“And it’s Chidi with the tackle!” she throws her hands into the air, “Team Shelstrop, second down and five!”

“I suck at American football.” Chidi groans, struggling to sit up.

“Clearly you don’t because I’m going to feel that in the morning.” she rolls her shoulders and cracks her neck on both sides for effect.

He is about to retort when she leans down and wraps her arms around his neck, hugging him tightly.

“Thanks for this, man.” she murmurs, “If we’re walking into a memory wipe, and y'know, this is it.”

He doesn’t know what to do, lying there in the dirt with Eleanor effectively wrapped around him. She sits there for a moment, just breathing with him evenly when Jason yells, “Dope! I caught the soccer ball!" 

Eleanor shoots up and untangles herself, running towards their companion with a competitive shout. He slowly sits up and straightens the hem of his now untucked shirt, uneffectively dusting this pants as he stands.

He joins Tahani at the garden wall, noting the thin layer of dirt that has settled in the cracks of the off-white stucco and relents, leaning against the grime. His towering friend has a few uncharacteristic rumples in her flower-print skirt and her hair is frizzy in the dry heat.

“So are you going to tell her?” Tahani wears a knowing smile, but it has the edge of sadness on it’s corner.

“Tell her that I don’t know if I only want to be just friends?” he crosses his arms over his chest to hold something in— but he isn’t sure what, “Not only is that a half-baked confession— we’re going to go back and forget because our plan is basically the exact opposite of foolproof.”

“All the more reason to, should you not?” her wide, doe-eyes glancing at Eleanor and Jason now trying to peg one another with the soccer ball, “It’s been nearly a year! Surely that you care for her can be more well put than ‘be not just friends’.”

“It’s ethically unsound to cause her the same kind of indecisive pain.” he watches Eleanor’s hair fly into her face as she swings her arm back and manages to hit Jason right in the stomach with her throw. He shouldn’t laugh, the spittle drifting from Jason’s perfectly O’ed mouth catching the light artfully as it arced through the air. He feels the chuckle slip out.

“It’s ethically unsound to keep her in the dark in our last hour as this version of ourselves.” Tahani murmurs, “And I have no doubt she’d be very decisive, as is her way.” He knows it is just loud enough for him to hear and twist kernels of doubt in his stomach. Or maybe that’s just dread from the ceaseless slow creep towards their inevitable erasure. Every stride towards her moral redemption, every quirk of her mouth upwards when she grasps a concept or grasps his shoulders in exasperation, every over-excited kiss on the cheek with some ill-thought out plan glinting in her aquamarine eyes like seaglass in the afternoon sun— gone.

 **“** That’s not a real argument.” he doesn’t convince himself.

“Is too.” she sighs, “I speak what I know resonates with you because… oh the way you look at her Chidi. I cannot fight the impulse to advocate for the romantic in yourself.”

He knots his brows together, “No. I stand by it. I would be telling her as a self-serving catharsis, to soothe some inflamed part of my irrational primitive instinct. And I’m not even—“

She places her index finger over his lips and cuts him off mid sentence. Then, she places the other hand over the left side of his chest, “Heart over head, just this once.”

“I want to remember us as unlikely friends.” he says, the whistle of the train drowning out any chance of being heard, “We deserve better than something in between.”

That’s the part that is all heart. He is sitting on the garden wall and chooses not to tell her that all the flowers are for her.

 

**Attempt #99**

_Be slow to fall into friendship; but when thou art in, continue firm and constant. - Socrates_

 

His balcony is tiny. Just big enough for two tiny, wicker chairs and a rickety, wooden, circular table. The window box planters are overflowing with rosy Adeniums, spilling out and over the ledges and dripping down the sides. It reminds him of a hotel room that he stayed in for a conference in New Orleans. Scents of sweet coffee and cream and fried dough drifting up from the square. He remembers the vibrant colors and the mismatched furniture were a little bit disorienting, but that he had thought that heaven might glance close to this kind of dreamy ease.

The night hangs from the strings of the half-finished mugs of tea on the table. He always thought heaven would be quiet. Wind kicking the leaves up from the cobblestones below with a nonchalance.

There is a clattering from the room behind him and he doesn’t bother to look as Eleanor yelps and begins scrambling to shove what he knows are his precariously stacked piles of philosophy books back into the shelf. He hears her shuffling footsteps approach and looks over his shoulder to see her peek her head out from around the french doors, sheepishness coloring her cheeks pink. 

“So, um, nice night?” she edges outside, making sure to keep the door flush against her to obscure his view into his living room.

He makes a fake irritated face, “Please tell me you didn’t break my bookshelf.”

She blinks innocently, the corner of her lip twitching slightly like it always does when she lies, “I didn’t break your bookshelf?”

He laughs, picking up the mugs and handing hers back to her, “Did your snooping turn up anything particularly scandalous on your way back from the ‘bathroom’?”

She tries her best to look affronted as she accepts the mug and sits down, “If I _was_ snooping— which I was not, you are a pretty boring guy.”

“You know you could just ask me if you want to know anything in particular,” he takes a sip but keeps eye contact, trying his best to get his earnestness across.

She leans her head to the side, studying him, “I don’t know, what else is there to know? You like to read stuff a bunch of dead guys, who probably never got laid, wrote cause all they care about is philosophy." 

He shrugs, “I guess. I mean make some killer baby-back ribs. And I’m not bad at singing. Also, midnight is my favorite time of day.”

“Whoa,” she crinkles up her nose, “Slow down there, Chidi. I didn’t ask for your dating profile.”

He frowns, “I don’t know, I just realized after a month I still know nothing about you. And I feel like you’re doing it on purpose." 

“I don’t do personal unless I’m drunk or we’re banging.” she stares into her mug, “I’m pretty boring also, even if I was sort of an ash-hole before I died.”

“Well, you’ve definitely shown up drunk every weekend on my doorstep to talk about your parents,” he says bluntly, “Maybe try it when you’re sober? I’m also a good listener.”

She looks surprised, then reaches up and smushes her face into her palm, “Ugh, have I really?”

He nods. The warm breeze drifts by and he can smell autumn on the wind, even if it seems to be perpetually sunny in the Good Place. The stars are just light enough to make out, pinpricks in the roof of their world.He’s come to accept her, even if he disliked her in the beginning for taking away any chance at a soulmate, even though she unfailingly comes crashing through his door like clockwork smelling like whiskey with guilt drooping from her censored curses. He’s come to begrudgingly admire her resolve to survive.

She goes quiet for a minute biting her lip, “What do you want to know?”

“Only what you want to tell me?” he sighs, “I’m not here to be pushy, I just feel like you could use a friend.”

She smiles briefly at the word, friend. It’s the most momentary flash of teeth before her face is back to a pensive tenseness as pulls her knees up to her chest, propping her heels on the edge of the chair. He notices for the first time that she is rather small. 

“And here I thought you were only sticking around cause you had to morally.” she shrugs, “It’s not like I haven’t had _friends_ —but we don’t talk about stuff unless we’re drunk." 

He feels a swell of sympathy for her, “Okay well, every time you’ve shown up you’ve gone on and on about your mom. Tell me about your dad?”

Her face lights up a little bit, “He was definitely no saint. But we got along pretty well. He’d let me stay up late when I spent the weekend with him, watch SNL or Top Gun for the millionth time. He’d give me beers even though I was like fourteen and he always wanted to know about the trouble I got into.”

She has a warm nostalgic fondness in her tone, “Sometimes the cops would come cause he’d get caught on security cams for stealing something from a pawn shop, or whatever. We made it a game. I’d go up to the door and try to spin as ridiculous a tale as I could as to why he wasn’t home and see if I could get them to buy it. One time I told them he was on a canned cheese bender several states away. I pretty sure the officer was high or something cause he definitely bought it. My dad bought me a new Walkman after that one.”

He has to glance away because he can’t hide the pity that he knows is showing on his face, “You sound like you miss it—" 

She snorts, “Oh, fork no.”

He thumbs the handle of his mug, trying to think of what to say. When he looks up, he realizes she has been staring at him. Her shoulders are slightly slumped and she seems to be holding her breath. It takes him a minute to notice that she is waiting for him to be appalled by the tightness of her jaw and the knot of her brows. He realizes this explains a lot about her. And he also realizes that she doesn’t necessarily forgive herself for being cruel or dismissive or wrong. There is no begrudging anything in this moment, and he is certain of himself for the first time in a long time. He admires her.

He raises his mug towards her, “Well— I guess your oversharing makes us friends now.”

She laughs and lifts her drink as well, “You sure?”

He clinks his mug against hers, “I’m sure.”

 

 **Attempt #478**  

_What we expect, that we find. - Aristotle_

 

There is late afternoon sunlight on the lake. The weeping willows brush his forearms as he follows Eleanor when she ducks under the verdant curtain, appreciating the way the mottled shadows speckle her cheeks and neck. She twirls around and breathes deep, eyelashes dusting her cheeks, as if she has missed the sun.

She walks up to the water’s edge, footsteps sinking into the soft earth. He watches her considering something as the gentle tide laps at her sneakers. He feels an affectionate smile creep up before she whips around and he nearly starts at the resolute, mischievous glint in her eyes.

She is running towards him, suddenly, and he can barely utter a half-shout and hop a few steps back before her surprisingly strong grasp closes around his wrists and begins dragging him towards the lake at a staggering sprint. They splash into the water, spray arcing away from their path like crystalline wings, catching the sunlight and seeming iridescent from within. He feels himself breathing hard as they come to stillness, wetness seeping around his shins and creeping up the fabric of his khakis.

Eleanor’s eyes are wide, a shirt-eating grin spread all the way across her face. Her shirt is darkened all across the front as she begins laughing, holding her sides as the guffaws trumpet in the still, spring air. She pulls her lips all the way back when she laughs, it takes hold of her entire body and shimmies through her shoulders.

He feels himself reaching forward before it registers, palms cupping her face with a hurriedness that is almost rough. He presses his lips to her smile, smothering a laugh that almost morphs into a gasp as she freezes. He watches her close her eyes and slowly give in as he shuts his own. Her lips taste like the cupcakes they shared on the walk, a bit like frosting. They are dry and soft. She kisses as enthusiastically as she laughs, hands splayed against his chest as she trails them up behind his neck. He pulls her flush against him, drinking in the scent of her floral perfume, lifting her to her toes. He might be drowning. He doesn’t want to come up for air.

She pulls back first, their breaths mingling as she looks at him with the edge of disbelief still wearing off. He presses his lips to her nose and a wide smile finally breaks out. He leans in again, brief, sweet, slow as he feels her go a little weak at the knees and he laughs against her mouth.

It feels right. It feels overdue.

 

**Attempt #802**

_For without risk there is no faith, and the greater the risk, the greater the faith. - Søren Kierkegaard_

 

“I t-thought you were going to say no.” she slurs at him as she sways heavily.

He shakes his head, “I love dancing. It’s something I was okay at doing that wasn’t talking people’s ears off.”

She quickly takes both his hands and hops a little bit out of time in place, “Am I doing it, Chidi? M’I super good?”

He laughs and raises her hand over her head as she does a clumsy spin, “Best I’ve ever seen.”

“Liar.” she leans back as far as she can so he has to pull a little bit to keep her from falling backwards, “Okay but we can also spin super fast like when we were lil’ kids until I puke." 

“Or,” he guides her hand to his shoulder and begins to pull her along gently in an almost cha-cha step, “We could do the first thing you suggested and dance, instead.” 

She giggles and they ease into a rhythm completely outside the music, the party fading into the background as he focuses on keeping her upright. She is smiling unabashedly for the first time he has seen in truly weeks. There is a radiance that was dimmed by stress that he has always known to be there, and didn’t realize was missing until the burden of imminent doom reared back made itself known to them. He doesn’t want to know what would happen to them in that moment. His mind is quiet. Or it is full. It was just decidedly and unquestionably stilled with this image of her head thrown back, skirt flying just a little too high as she spins, mascara bleeding onto the purple-blue circles that are likely under all of their eyes. She feels like familiarity in his arms. And there is dejavu. As if she has been here hundreds of times before, right in front of him. 

It is precarious in this saturated instant. It is standing at the edge of memory and momentary.

He finds that Michael has succeeded in one thing. This is a razor-thin kind of torture. It is wounds just beneath the skin so that he knows they are there and they are painful. But he cannot see them, analyze them, heal them, succumb. He is just aware. Without any action that is required, any decisions to be made. It is a hurt that has all the choice in the world without any consequence or direction. If he believed in them a little bit more. If he didn’t think he was going to the bad place—

He closes his grasp around her hand as she rests her head in the crook of his neck, feeling her breaths fan out over his collarbones. He raises her palm to his heart. It is beating fast, full and thick and uncontrolled. She is warm. The music plays out-of-step. The lights flicker out as Janet waves her hand. The stars come out. Tahani is crying silently and Jason is asleep on the grass. He is content.

He could love her. It would be so easy.

He wraps his arm around her waist— presses his lips gently to her forehead.

And there is an intrusive and unquestionable thought.

This isn’t the version of himself that is in love with Eleanor Shellstrop— _yet._


End file.
